Bank Accounts

The Transactions item in the main menu is designed to facilitate the creation, management, and viewing of banks and bank accounts, as well as to review transactions linked to them.

To view and manage bank accounts:

Go to the “Transactions” section from the main menu.
A list of all created bank accounts, along with their details, will be displayed. Available actions:
Edit Accounts: Click the “Edit” button next to an account to update its details. Editing is available to administrators.
View Transactions: Click the “Transaction” button next to an account to view the transaction list linked to that specific account.

This list holds every account, whether or not it belongs to a bank. An account with no bank shows a dash in the Bank column, and it is edited from here — the Manage Banks page lists accounts underneath their bank, so an account that belongs to none appears on it nowhere.

Filter Hidden Accounts:

At the top of the page, there’s a filter labeled “Hidden”.
If checked, the list will list bank accounts marked as hidden.

To manage banks and their associated accounts:

Click the “Manage Banks” button at the top of the Transactions page.
This redirects you to the Banks Management page, displaying all existing banks.
If a bank has multiple accounts, they are displayed as child elements under the respective bank. Available actions:
Add New Banks: Use the “Add Bank” button to create a new bank.
Edit Existing Banks: Click the “Edit” button next to a bank or its accounts to modify details.
Add New Account: Use the “Add account” button to create a new account to specific bank.

Add New Bank

To add a new bank, follow these steps:

Select "Transactions" item from the main menu.
Click on "Manage Banks" at the top of the page.
Click “Add Bank” in the top right corner.
In the form that appears, provide the Bank Name and Swift number.
Click “Save”.

Created Bank is added to the list.

Add Account to the Bank

To add an account to an existing bank, follow these steps:

Click on the dedicated button located on the right side of the bank's row.
In the appeared form, provide the following information:
- Account Name
- Prefix
- Account Number
- Currency
- Type (can be regular or VAT)

You can mark the account as default if applicable. Additionally, you can mark account as hidden, this way it won't be shown in the Transactions item until filter Hidden is selected. Hiding also withdraws the account's transactions from the rest of the application — see Hiding an account below.

Note: To make currencies available in the selector, configure them under "Currencies" in the General Settings menu.

Note: The Account Number is what an imported bank statement is matched against. An account left without an account number is never matched to an uploaded statement file, so statements for it have to be assigned by hand. Fill the account number in for every account you intend to import statements into.

After creation, the account will appear as a child element of the bank on the Manage Banks page and in the Bank Accounts list.

Editing an existing account

Currency and Type are fixed once an account has them. They set how the amounts already recorded against the account are read, so changing either one afterwards would reinterpret the account's history; the two fields are shown but cannot be edited.

An account saved without a currency or a type is the exception: the empty field stays editable, so you can fill it in and save. Everything else about the account — its name, prefix and account number — remains editable either way.

Two ways to retire an account

An account you no longer work with can be disposed of in two different ways, and the row offers them as two separate controls because they are not variations of one another:

Hide withdraws the account and its transactions from view while keeping every record. It can be undone at any time.
Delete removes the account, its transactions and its stored statement files for good. It cannot be undone.

Reach for Hide unless you specifically need the records gone. It is the answer to almost every reason an account stops being used — the bank relationship ended, the account was closed, the statements were imported into the wrong place — and it leaves the history intact for audits and for closed budget periods.

Hiding an account

Hiding is the way to retire an account you no longer work with while keeping what it recorded. It goes further than tidying the account picker: a hidden account's transactions stop being served anywhere in the application.

Select Hide on the account's row. The confirmation states what will happen: the account and its transactions stop being shown everywhere, budget totals included, nothing is deleted, and it can be unhidden at any time.

While an account is hidden:

Its transactions do not appear in the transaction list or the balance chart, and they are not returned by filters or searches over transactions.
They are not counted in budget figures. A transaction on a hidden account is left out of budget summaries, cost tables and budget totals, including a transaction that was linked to a budget by hand before the account was hidden.
A budget line backed by a hidden account's transaction is excluded rather than shown as an empty row.

Nothing is deleted. The transactions stay in your data exactly as they were; they are only withheld from view and from calculation. Clear the Hidden mark on the account and every one of those transactions is served again, with budget figures returning to what they were.

Two consequences are worth knowing before you hide an account:

Budget totals that included the account will change, including totals for months that are already closed. If a budget figure has moved and you cannot account for it, check whether an account feeding that budget has been hidden.
Hiding is about the whole account, not about one transaction. To leave a single movement out of a budget, unlink that transaction from the budget instead.

To find accounts that are currently hidden, select the Hidden filter at the top of the Transactions page.

Deleting an account

Delete is the irreversible disposal. It permanently removes the account, all of its transactions, and the statement files stored against it. There is no archive and no recycle bin, and the records cannot be recovered afterwards.

Because of that, deleting is deliberately harder than hiding:

Delete is restricted to administrators. Someone who manages banks and accounts can hide an account but is not offered the delete control at all.
The confirmation names what is destroyed — the transactions and the stored statement files — and states that it cannot be undone. It also points out that hiding is available if you only want the account out of the way.
You must type the account's name into the confirmation before the delete can be accepted. Clicking through it is not possible, so a near-miss on the wrong row cannot destroy an account.

When a delete is refused

Flowtly refuses to delete an account whose records are still relied on elsewhere, rather than removing them and letting the figures that depended on them fall over. When that happens the confirmation stays open and states what is holding the account and how many — for example that its transactions carry a number of budget links.

That message is the useful part of the refusal: it tells you exactly what to unpick if you genuinely intend to delete the account. Resolve what it names and try again, or hide the account instead.

Deleting is also offered for an account that is already hidden — hiding first and deleting later is a reasonable sequence, and a hidden account naturally shows only the delete control, since it is already hidden.

Prefer hiding when in doubt. A hidden account can always be brought back; a deleted one cannot. If an account was removed and its transactions still appear somewhere, it was hidden rather than deleted — and the reverse matters more: once a delete goes through, no trace of those transactions remains to be found later.

Example use cases

A financial controller needs to review all incoming and outgoing transactions across various company bank accounts to reconcile ledgers.
An accountant wants to add a new corporate bank account recently opened to track its transactions within Flowtly.
A finance manager wants to quickly identify a specific bank account to check its current status or associated transactions.
A user retires a closed bank account by hiding it, so that its transactions stop appearing in transaction lists and stop counting towards budgets, while the records themselves are kept.
A finance manager finds a budget total lower than expected and checks the Hidden filter to see whether an account feeding that budget has been hidden.
An administrator permanently deletes an account created by mistake, along with the statement wrongly imported into it, so that none of its transactions remain queryable.
An administrator attempts a delete, reads the refusal naming how many budget links the account's transactions carry, and hides the account instead.